Charles van Commenee is targeting Britain's best medal haul in 12 years at the European Championships in Barcelona this month. The head coach has been given a target of 10-15 medals by UK Sport, of which he believes "seven or eight" could be gold.

That would mark a steep upward trajectory from Britain's worst-ever result at a European Championships when, four years ago in Gothenburg, the team failed to win a single individual gold medal.

"I'm looking forward to some obvious names who will be in the mix for medals," said Van Commenee. "Jessica Ennis is our team captain and obviously she is there to win the gold medal, anything less than that would be a disappointment. I'm sure there will be more than one [gold medal]. There are quite a number, seven or eight athletes, who can do that, possibly."

With five of Britain's athletes currently topping the European rankings – Ennis, Dwain Chambers, David Greene, Mo Farah and Laura Turner – the pressure is on to convert rankings into medals.

"We have a target from UK Sport of 10-15 medals. I would be embarrassed if we could not make that target, I'm confident that we will do that. Some months ago, I expressed an ambition to have the best possible result of all time which is 18 medals – [but] since that moment we have quite a few casualties and one pregnancy. So that ambition that was already quite ambitious – maybe even more ambitious now."

Van Commenee's team will be without a handful of star names including the injured Christine Ohuruogu, who hopes to make a return in time to defend her title at the Commonwealth Games in October, and Paula Radcliffe who is expecting her second child in September.

The Dutch coach says he will be looking at individual athletes to step up their performances, such as 400m runner Martyn Rooney, Dame Kelly Holmes's protege, 1500m runner Hannah England, and 800m runner Michael Rimmer.

"We're running a four-year programme," said Van Commenee in describing the European Championships' importance to success in 2012. "It doesn't make sense to have an easy year in between with athletes just making the team and not being competitive at the global or Olympic level. That means that 2010 European Championships is all geared towards the Olympic Games in 2012."